Live Binders

I definitely have an obsession with organization.  I also happen to love convenience.  Everyone should have their bookmarks saved online so that they can be accessed from everywhere (especially when your line of work often requires you to use different computers).

In the past, I used delicious and diigo.  I liked them both, but did not have the freedom to organize my bookmarks the way I wanted.  Enter livebinder.com.  LiveBinder lets you create different "binders" to organize your bookmarks as tabs.  It even lets you save multiple subtabs to further organize your bookmarks.  They also have "shelves" to organize your binders on.  If you're an organization nerd like me, LiveBinder is the bookmark organizer you've been looking for.

My current LiveBinders:
NCTM Articles
Common Core
General Math Resources
Geometry Resources
Favorite Blogs 

Locus Activity

Last week I did an activity with my students that they loved.  It has been rare for me to conduct activities with them because of the short amount of time we have to learn the curriculum before the Regents.  I'm so excited for this to change next year.  (Unfortunately, it appears as though locus is being removed from the curriculum anyway.)

My activity was exploring the five locus theorems.  I purchased two "medium" bags of m&ms, and had more than enough.  I have 65 students and gave each 8 m&ms.  I put the m&ms in a little Dixie cup so they had a place to keep them between setting up for each theorem (and to keep the m&ms from rolling around the desks and onto the floors). Each student was given a worksheet with diagrams of the locus givens.  (Get the worksheet here.)  They used the m&ms as points and arranged them to find the points that work for each locus theorem.  Once they had the right ideas, I had them remove the m&ms and draw the dotted lines on their worksheets.  When they had all five locus theorems correct, they were rewarded with m&ms.